"You need to work with a person for a week or so..." Who has the luxury of time and energy, from both sides of the hiring process, to spend a week assessing someone? I would be genuinely interested to hear from anyone who has done this and the cost v benefit, maybe a day or half day is possible but imho a week is far beyond what most organisations and candidates would consider

+100 to chilimatic's reply, naming stuff properly trumps comments every time, over time comments become white noise or wallpaper which you will tune out or not notice, especially as most IDEs colour comments so as to be less prominent than the actual code. The best comments are additional to well named and structured code and form part of your docs so are in consistent form and style

"I don't know but I have an idea how to find out", just be honest and enthusiastic about learning

Open source it and allow the users and community to maintain it :-)

I wholeheartedly agree with your post. I've worked at companies where those in charge of hiring have focused on github profiles and in my opinion it was only ever an ego based benchmark of a candidate. Progressing or dismissing candidates on public code is not a measure of the candidate it is a measure of the recruiter. In my current role we ask suitable candidates to complete a task from our backlog and then review this with them face to face. It provides a standard objective form of assessment and is representative of the work we want them to do. I believe that focusing on public repos is in the same camp as whiteboard exercises in that these practices tell the candidates more about the company and its culture than it tells the company about the quality of the candidate. I really like the follow up you mention of sharing a screen and adding a feature and may roll this into our hiring process thanks for sharing your post!

Thanks for the response guys, was looking for some ideas and got a few so great stuff. To give a bit of context if anyone cares; We're not bothered which language, our current stack has Python and JS but we can pick something up as long as there is a community out there to support us Prefer interpreted over compiled, so no .NET - although I love C# and we have years of experience in the team we don't want to move that way here We're fairly early product development stage, finding market fit so quick iteration is preferred over performance at scale, but obviously the less tech debt we incur the better We definitely do not want to write our own, (why does anyone?) we want to stand on the shoulders of giants and reap the benefits by applying a solid framework to our area of application Strapi looks great, thanks for the tip, I've read a little about Nest and like the look of that too but both still Node although that's not a bad thing Anymore ideas feel free to ping them over, thanks again for the tips really appreciated